America's Better Loved Poems, Part I

The Road Not Taken

The best loved poems of a particular generation are like a window into the heart of a culture.  This from Martin Kettle, writing in the Guardian in April 2000:

The idea of the United States as a nation of poetry lovers may not fit the European stereotypes of a gun-toting, execution-obsessed land of couch potatoes. All the same, it turns out to be true. Poetry is alive and well and living in America.

Two years ago, America's poet laureate launched a campaign to discover the nation's favourite poem. It was an act of faith rather than logic, Robert Pinsky said at the time. But Mr Pinsky's appeal hit the spot. Now, more than 18,000 written, videotaped and recorded suggestions later, he has been overwhelmed by the response.

The Favourite Poem Project, which Mr Pinsky has coordinated through the Library of Congress, where the US laureate is based, has yielded a massive and diverse archive, with contributors ranging in age from four to 99. Though submissions have come from every state in the union, the muse seems to be strongest in the north-eastern US, with New York and Massachusetts supplying the most responses to Mr Pinsky's appeal. . . .

America's favourite poem, on the basis of Mr Pinsky's bulging postbag, is the characteristically reflective and solitary The Road Not Taken, written by the San Francisco-born poet Robert Frost, one of the laureate's predecessors.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference

It is intriguing to contemplate why this might be the best loved poem in the United States of our generation.  We suspect it is because it captures a mood of wistful regret, of dissatisfaction with one's life lived thus far.  "If only . . ." would thus appear to be a national malaise.  This implies a gnawing dissatisfaction with life.  It is true that when a culture makes an idol of anything, but of Man in particular, deep disappointment and regret awaits. 

How different when one's life is able to be built upon an abiding faith in the all perfect, total Providence of God.  How blessed it is to know and believe that even the evil choices and deeds have their good purpose in the end and that in God's intents, plans, and purposes for the roads we have chosen and travelled there will be glory to Him, and goodness to us.  We believe this in faith, without necessarily seeing or understanding how.  When we believe this, bad choices no longer gnaw at the soul.

Ironically, Frost apparently never intended to capture a sense of  personal malaise with this poem.  It appears rather that he wrote it as an expression of whimsy and light-heartedness. 

Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, "The Road Not Taken" has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for – and so effects – his own destiny. But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky."

Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome of the road not taken? For another: had the poet chosen the road more travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the poem intended to explode a more earnest reading. The two paths, he wrote, had been worn "really about the same", and "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black", showing the reader that neither road was more or less travelled, and that choices may in some sense be equal.

 It would, then, be a national mood, a zeitgeist, which has read into the poem doubts and regrets.